Chapter 072: Gateway

“Why do I have a feeling that I won’t like it one bit, hmm?”

Firewing shrugged in answer, but without a smile on her face. So whatever’s coming, it’s not optimistic. One more piece of shit to deal with, ugh.

If we aren’t saved from the game until the end of the Twilight War, I’m going to persuade Simea and move out. I’ll buy some low-ranking noble title in the Imperium, and get myself some small mansion in a rather scenic area. And then I won’t leave that mansion (unless the end of the world happens) until my death of old age. Ugh.

“Well, you probably won’t like it. And neither will any other Player.” What? “I’m multitasking a lot recently. Even when you came I was both working on alchemy and continuing my analysis of the Player interface.”

Which, as I must say, scares me a lot. NPC able to manipulate RPG system in a VR-game? Even if it’s just Robinson screwing with us by blowing up the fourth wall quite expertly, it’s still… weird.

“And you discovered something?”

She nodded. “You can say so. First of all, it’s the most perfect magical system I ever saw, capable of doing things we always thought of as impossible, like resurrecting people. Chances that anyone beside a god was capable of making it without the whole thing collapsing on our heads long ago are basically non-existent. And if that’s not proof enough, the whole thing requires a constant and stable power source surpassing the strongest of Dungeons. If a human’s average power is one, then a Black Crystal grade dungeon is in the high bilions. The RPG interface, in the meantime, would be in the nonilions. There is only one potential source that could supply this amount of power for so long.”

“World Engine.” I said, and she nodded in answer.

The gods’ domain (and afterlife) of the Imperial Religion took the form of a raging inferno of Aetherial Vortex surrounding World Engine, a beating heart of Creation forged by Allmaker/The Eldest, the now absent Creator-God. It was the source of power and life and the entire Creation, literally powering up even the laws of physics.

The Aetherial Vortex exhausted a lot of power into two streams that made the whole thing look a bit like a two-armed spiral Galaxy, both called Elemental Wastes. Elemental Pantheon and elementals dwelled there, haunting planes so scorched with raging elements (and irradiated by the magic of the World Engine) that all life was impossible.

On one side was the White Pantheon and the Heavens (plus tonnes of smaller dimensions inhabited by powerful White Pantheon’s archdaemon wanting some privacy and light-sided gods of polytheistic religions vassalized by the Imperial Religion). On the other, the Black Pantheon, with its Gehenna long ago splintered into hundreds of smaller (some were still close to infinite in size) dimensions, where Gods, demigods, archdaemons and a lot of darkside gods of vassalized religion kept playing a multidimensional chess deathmatch battle royale). And Beyond with all the Aberrants existing beyond the light of the World Engine (with Pandaemonium, head domain of the Pentagram, being essentially its bridgehead on the borders of Gehenna that locals kept trying to dislodge for eternity).

Needless to say, the Imperial Religion priests generally avoided the subject of where exactly the monotheistic Gods were in that system.

The estimates of the energy output of World Engine were… well, it wasn’t something you can estimate. Quite probably it was infinite. Powering up something like the interface (with all of its convenient quirks like accelerated learning, resurrections and even occasional teleportation) with it wouldn’t even be noticeable, despite surpassing strongest possible being in the mortal world’s.

But the chances for anybody beside the Gods’ to get into the imperial afterlife, sneak past raging currents of the Aetherial Vortex and then connect something to the Engine were absolutely not existing. Even without considering that Destiny, Imperial Goddess of Fate and Magic, was living literally in front of it. And that she commanded an army of ever-watchful and all-seeing guardians that nobody really described in detail. Mostly because no mortal was ever stupid enough to find a way to intrude upon the Afterlife and then go THERE.

Or maybe they haven’t returned to tell the tale.

I was quite sure from the start that the two possible culprits were Gods (if this world was true) and Robinson (if it really was a game). Firewing, in the same time, had a bit different approach as she was a local. And as all of them, she was seriously shocked each time she saw Gods doing something in person.

“Well, and that’s where the problem starts.” She continued. “I probed the system deep enough to understand a few things about how it’s constructed. While also learning a lot about advanced magic, it seriously is an amazing construction.” Heh, good for you. “The biggest problem is that it doesn’t draw power directly from World Engine. Instead, it seems that a lot of power was taken from it and used to construct a separate power source. This ‘Interface Engine’, however, is not an Engine… and that’s a problem.”

“W...what?” I think I got lost.

“It’s not an engine. It’s a battery.” What does it m… oh shit.

“The power source is finite?!” She nodded in answer.

“I haven’t found any indications of an existence of any way of recharging it. So it’s a battery. An impossibly powerful one, but still a battery. The whole system is designed to power down part by part. This process already started, as there are semblances of sentience within the system so it can make internal modifications in order to achieve a set of basic goals that I’m yet to decipher. But I think that it’s essentially trying to save power to prolong the primary system’s lifespan by shutting down secondary systems. Like the bad jokes on death screen, that it probably deemed as something unneeded and costly, as they required a system to keep track of the way you were dying and then check everything surrounding it for potential jokes.”

“How long?” To say it was an important information would be an understatement.

“The system is already collapsing. Bad jokes were tertiary in value, but it’s going to soon start shutting down secondary systems. Like quest tracking. The only primary systems I found are resurrections and acceleration of learning. If the current speed of system collapse will remain, I estimate that they will be terminated in approximately six to seven months from now.”

Hyperrealism Addon, my ass. The whole ‘game’ was essentially an introduction period. Get in, get strong or at least competent enough to find your own place in this world… and then better get used to that, as after the system collapses we will no longer get stronger this fast. We’ll be literally nothing different in nature with the locals.

But something went wrong, and now we have the Twilight War and Glitches running around. With Gods probably pushing for the War to happen in best possible moment. When we, the Players, will be at the apex of our strength, and before the Glitches grow too strong and/or numerous (all enemies like that grow overtime, it’s kinda a rule) for us to face.

This also means that we can’t really hope to become one-man-armies. Players are going to grow rapidly, but we are more or less close to the top in terms of speed of our growth (because Gods, again). There is no way we can get to the absolute top of power in six months.

The Players’ arrival will simply cause adventurers’ ranks to bulge in the upper ranks (platinum, mithrils, maybe few adamantiums) temporarily. However, the increased fierceness of the Great Game meant a surge of daemons. They will whittle down our numbers, we’ll whittle down their numbers. The world will get some more artifacts, a lot of legends will be born, one or two lucky people gets ascended into daemonhood or low class godhood. Then, in 20-30 years, everything balances itself back into normalcy.

Gods seems to have planned everything (or Robinson paid the people figuring the plot out well). Glitches were an exception, giving some credence to ‘it’s a game!’ part. Then again, this world had enough out-of-context problems for them to have many potential explanations.

Yhrezerach remained silent, watching us intently.

“There is also some sort of … program I stumbled upon recently.” Firewing said. ”I think it’s going to fire when the amount of remaining power within the system grows too little. I should be able to decipher it if I work on it some more. The power the system has reserved for the purpose of that thing firing is quite substantial.” Wonderful. That’s just what I wanted to hear.

“Interesting, keep me posted.” I guess we’ll now need to wait for that elven scout to finally come back and tell us about the incoming (and probably unavoidable) clusterfuck of hatred and murder.

***

He came back two hours later. I spent the time with Simea. I think I figured out the minor (when compared to the one bothering Lena and Leria) problem with her. Mostly because it’s bedroom-related. Thankfully I didn’t ask Yhrezerach since he would probably be a jerk over that.

Ugh. I’ll have to work on that when we have a time.

The elf (I already forgot his name and saw no reason to remind myself of it) came with the regular report of the surrounding countryside… and information that we found some old stone structure that seems to have a traces of magic to it because despite the whole area being totally covered in snow, it was uncovered.

Figuring that it was the New Adventure that Yhrezerach talked about wasn’t rocket science.

We moved out in our standard group. Me, Leria, Lena, Simea, Vaera and Syna. Firewing (she made… preparations) and the militia as Hold’s defense, Kovacs and two different (we grew fast) groups of proto-adventurers from the villagers outside of Hold to work hard as adventurers.

They were pretty much iron (with one or two with some former life combat skills being silver-class) grade, but hey - you don’t need to a Chosen One to mine iron from The Descent’s outer corridors. We pretty much militarized the entire village population at this point, as all able-body villagers were at the very least taught some self-defense skills.

***

We reached the target in about an hour of trek. Through mountains and in -40C, so it wasn’t very far. One more thing omitted because the cult made sure that everybody thought that the whole region was a murderous mess so people kept clear of it.

The whole thing was… well, to be honest I’m not surprised that nobody saw it, even despite the masquerade. It probably wasn’t possible to be detected outside of winter. And harsh one.

It was stone, yes… but most of it was covered in earth. Which was a problem, since it was just a flat surface from smooth stone. With magical runes and symbols on it. Now, when it was the middle of winter, the lack of snow upon it was almost painfully obvious (it was more than a meter of snow around it, and literally zero on it).

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

The reason for this was that something was stabilizing temperature on ~2C in the direct vicinity of the stone floor. Hmph. Magic, obviously.

We carefully uncovered the dirt, making sure to not damage the floor beneath it.

“That will be ymririan.” I decided after a while. “Thaumaturgical language born from the language of Ymrir the Black’s tribe of origin. Supposedly he wiped them out, because they dared to feel that they deserve a part of his glory, but the language remained as thaumaturgical language of early ymririan states. This thing is probably almost as old as the Dawn War.”

“Any idea what that is?” Vaera asked.

“Nope. There are probably less than fifty people in the world that can read it, most of them archeologists. Ymririan was phased out long ago and replaced by more modern thaumaturgical aevarian in the Dragonspine Mountains, ashkarian in the west and the imperial thaumaturgical language in the east. Give me a second.”

I send a photo to Firewing but she quickly answered that she didn’t know ymririan. Yeah, not very surprising: magic went forward in the meantime and that age wasn’t know for being particularly powerful in terms of magic. Every magical thingy with ymririan runes was bound to be inferior in quality to both older and newer things.

What now?

Leria sat on her knees on the edge of the floor and seemed to stare on it intently.

“There is magic in it. And quite a bit of … evil magic.” Yes, my eldritch sense are tingling. Only a bit, but still, that confirms Leria’s observations.. “Try to analyze it deeper, maybe?”

I tend to avoid sticking my things in things that I don’t know anything about… but damn, no other option here, right?

I soon detected a self-recharging power storage beneath the floor. It was… quite massive. And I didn’t even know that old ymririans could make them! There were traces of magical power showing old connections with mana flowing to many other objects in the area, all of them severed.

So I guess there was a base here or something. Quite high-tech for its times. However everything was ruined by the time (or … something else - it was always a possibility). The only thing that remained was the mana crystal beneath (since it could use part of its magic power to keep itself working) and the floor, which seemed very important.

Interesting. Like, very interesting. I want to uncover the secret behind this mystery.

I tried to manipulate the magic, hopefully gaining some insight into the way it works in the process. Which wasn’t good idea, as I forgot I wasn’t an expert like Firewing. Heck, even that elven theoretical sorcerer (what was her name again?) would do a better job.

I triggered something and the floor beneath began charging with power. Aura manipulators retreated from it… but not before helping poor, squishy magicians like me evacuate as well.

Power surged and reality above the floor bent and twisted. A wave of foreign magic came from it. Then the rift started spreading…

Weird, I think I saw something similar. In the old game. It’s a like a portal, put rather than a gateway it’s more like a dome. One very thin and wide, but it’s still more than just a 2d gate...

NO FUCKING WAY.

I could see a look of absolute shock on Syna’s face. Yeah, former imperial. So she must have seen that already. I was about to start explaining when I saw both understanding and shock dawning on Leria’s face. Unexpected.

“Aether Gate.” Leria said before I could speak. “I can’t believe it.”

She was (temporarily) shocked enough to forget about her grumpy cat cosplay.

Yes, well, our ‘impossible things encountered’ rating just jumped by one.

“Ok, so… it’s some sort of teleportation device, right?” Vaera seems to have checked a bit about ‘our magic’ and knew enough to identify it as teleporter.

“Well, there are several different types of teleportation devices. All of them very bad in the economic department.” There was a reason why railways were a rage in the Imperium recently. “You essentially have a spatial magic-aligned daemon pull you from point A to B through the Dark, but establishing this brief connections costs tonnes of aether each time. Sending messages or a group of higher ranked adventurers or nobles that paid for it is one thing, trying to send trade goods or an army is something else. Aether Gate... “ I paused for a second, trying to conjure everything I knew about them from past game. “It’s a lost technology today. Only a few of them known in the world. Rather than pulling an object it establishes long-term dimensional bridge.”

“In short: you built a very small pocket dimension in the Dark and connect its two ends with two different, faraway points in the Light.” Leria surprised me with her knowledge.

“Easier said than done, at least when you don’t want the travellers to be … compressed and leave it while being a small fleshy cube five centimetres in diameter that rapidly disperses, spraying flesh, blood and guts on everyone around.” I added. “Because of that, people generally no longer really research them, just keep the old ones active. But there are like, ten of them still active? Though you don’t need to pay for their upkeep, they are just extremely costly when assembling. It was active but closed, so the cost of re-opening was quite small.”

It looks like the ymririans somehow assembled one, despite being supposedly quite primitive. Of course, I’m assuming here that the Gate is in workable condition and we won’t end up dead after the attempt to travel through it.

Firewing will be both shocked and interested. Extremely interested.

“Should we travel through it?” Simea asked the most important question.

“Well, we did somehow find it, and Yhrezerach obviously believes this to be a start of another… ‘adventure’.” Leria commented, without happiness in her voice. “We can safely assume that going through is the start.”

“Or: trying to figure how it happened to be here and maybe even finding a way to make another Gate is said adventure.” I added, but half-heartedly. I was pretty much playing a devil’s advocate here.

Needless to say, without me actually believing in what I said, there was no way I could succeed in the argument that ensued. It was short. The idea that we should pass through won.

Still no quest announcement. Did the thing break ahead of schedule? Or maybe it’s more like Vanvyra, where there obviously was no quest. Or maybe the quest tracking malfunctioned already back then?

Let’s go, then. Onwards to glory, death and, if local gods are real, some comfy place in eternity.

***

First thing we noticed after walking through the Gate was that we survived. No turning into a mincemeat. No explosion into gory cloud. Mild general discomfort that I do not remember from past transfer, but this was probably caused by the Gate being badly regulated and generally primitive.

Second thing we noticed after walking through the Gate was FUCKING THERMAL SHOCK. It was -40C around the Gate, 2C on it, and, like, fucking 30C on the other side. Oh, God. The first thing we all did was throwing away the comfy fur jackets we wore on our clothes.

Leria had it worse, she had fur BENEATH her armour so she quickly pulled a partial striptease while we were busy figuring out where we were.

Well, somewhere vastly different. Inside a stone building, but obviously old and partially ruined. Architecture unknown. Type of rock used unknown (but seemed to use at least some magic). Old ymririan origin quite possible, but they were like twenty different countries and cultures on Aevaria, so I could only guess.

… if that was Aevaria, obviously. The temperature didn’t fit… with exception of Northern Aevaria where ancient climate-shaping spells still hold. Actually, the temperature might just fit.

Interesting. And terrifying. Northern Aevaria, come on.

After Leria changed her clothes (hail inventory!) we decided to leave the building. I wrote a short description of what we just found to Firewing and Kovacs. Firewing responded with a shocked emoji, immediately followed by a question if she can check the portal.

I answered with ‘Yes, but don’t blow anything up’. Emoji, damn, locals are adapting too fast. I just hope that this whole mess doesn’t end up with Players introducing memes and emojis to local culture, the last thing we want is roman-style inscription and sculptures with memes on them.

Then we left the room…. only to run into whole encampment of armed people. Obviously surprised by our presence.

Oh, crap.

***

Since they were shocked enough by us showing up that I had time to appraise few of them. Weaker than us, but strong enough to swarm us if we decided to fight. No signs of Pentagram-corruption. Obviously not a military, and didn’t look like bandits. No slaves. One of the appraised seems to have been an adventurer.

So I raised my hands in this multiverse’ universal gesture of surrender. The others followed (though none of them seemed very happy with that).

I mean, what’s the worst that could happen?! We are all well trained in the art of flawless suicide, so the worst case scenario we’ll just kill ourselves and resurrect in the Hold.

Nobody here seemed to talk in any language we understood, so they just took our weapons and pushed us into some room in that ruined castle(?) we were in that they didn’t use for anything.

“Great, what now?” Leria asked.

“We wait.” I answered.

And we waited.

After maybe an hour some chainmail wearing low elf came.

Leavr Rannr

Gender: Male

Species: Low Elf

Level: 34

Class: Warrior

Active Effects:

Known Spells and Techniques:

???

… I take back the ‘weaker than us’ part. That’s level high enough to tank Leria at least for a while. Guy was probably an aura manipulator of at least 50th rank, judging from my magic sense readings. Leria (recently she kept growing in strength insanely), was somewhere close to that.

He said something in unknown language. We didn’t understand. He said something in different language. Vaera suddenly sprung up and answered something.

Uh-oh. Now that I think about it, they speak a different language in the Saltrock Mountains, right? How does Vaera know the language used in the Ambryxis region? Should I ask him?

They talked for a while.

“Uhm, Vaera?” He turned towards me.

“Ehm, it’s one of the common languages of Saltrock Mountains. His pronunciation kinda sucks. Looks like we are in Northern Aevaria. In its western province of Anataelia.” Crap, it’s almost at Ashkar’s border. Mountains started at the westernmost border, and the Tyranny occupied most of the mountainpasses. “It looks like we teleported right into a camp of some insurgents, but he wasn’t really talkative about that. We are supposed to be nice and quiet until their leader gets back, then she’ll decide what to do with us.”

My knowledge of Anataelia was very limited. Insignificant backwater in terms of economy. So close to Ashkar you couldn’t expect anything more, Northern Aevaria didn’t invest in the region because it was bound to get trashed by Ashkar if it ever wanted to. Northerners could hope to stop them deeper into their territory - guerilla warfare is a bitch when your soldiers are local equivalent of disorganised locust horde that is ready to eat everything including grass en route because their commanders don’t care enough to feed them - but here? No way.

It’s not like there was an open Northern Aevaria-Tyranny of Ashkar war recently, but they did happen from time to time. Sooner or later the Imperium was forced (while hating it immensely) to lead an all out offensive through the southern part of the mountains (and in Ashkar itself, the Tyranny haven’t conquered entirety of its continent of origin).

It went the other way around when Imperium tried to conquer Northern Aevaria for good. Geopolitical stalemate is a pain.

Anataelia was doubly useful as buffer zone because the entire area was absolutely crazy in terms of geography. Some mean things must have happened. Either during Dawn War or earlier. The name meant something alongside of ‘land of furrows’, and it was on point. Only the furrows tended to be rather twisted… and some reached a hundred kilometres in length. And more than a kilometre in height. Like a maze of absolutely idiotic proportions.

Humans don’t like to go through mazes, so a lot of tunnels were carved into the furrows. Plus a lot of mines (the weird geography exposed a lot of mineral veins), and a lot of older structures that nobody really liked to visit. Another background area where a lot of mean things stalked the night because civilization was still not fully there, and there was nobody to pay for mean things eradication.

Well, I guess we’ll learn more soon enough.